Genres of Ancient Poetry

The modern term "ancient poetry" is a broad concept, referring to ancient poetry in general.

The genres of poetry in ancient China are very wide, and we can divide them into several categories according to the clues of time:

1. The Poetry Scriptures. Poetry of the Yellow River Valley, it has different genres such as wind, elegance and ode, which later formed the form of narrow ancient poetry.

2. Ch'u-ch'iu style. The poetry of the Yangtze River basin, represented by the Li Sao, is called "Sao-style poetry".

Before the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, these two types of poems were the main ones, because "Feng" represented the Book of Songs and "Sao" represented the Chu Rhetoric, so there was the term "Feng Sao".

3, the narrow sense of ancient poetry. It is relative to the Tang Dynasty, is the poetry of the near-poetry, is poetry after the Ch'u Ch'iu, covering all the poetic genres. Such as Lefu, the North and South Dynasties folk songs, as well as four, five, six, seven poems. It includes chants that rely on musical forms.

4. Proximate poetry. Metrical poems that were stereotyped in the Tang Dynasty, such as metrical poems and stanzas.

5. Lyrics and other forms of poetry. They are developed from musical chants. Such as Song lyrics and Yuan songs.

In each of these classifications, there are different genres. For example, the proximal poems have the difference between plain and oblique, with or without rhyme in the first line; and the words have more than a thousand different word tags and formats.